Seems to me that since the forums moved to http://www.audiophiletalk.com they have never been the same. Is it just me? I use to spend a lot of time reading the forums, now I don't go there very often and don't stay very long when I do. Judging by the number of new topics, I'm not alone.

The forum is in an evolutionary state at the present time. Much of the general chit chat (54000 posts) were moved to audiophiletalk to jump start that new forum. At the same time I am slowly creating support boards for each product that we carry. This means that there will be more and more empty or nearly empty boards on the forum. That of course makes the forum look like everyone left the party. Once I get the boards in place I will start forwarding posts to their product specific board.

The idea behind this is to improve our product support. We would like to see a list of boards for each product so a user of the forum can quickly zero in on the information he or she is looking for about that product. It will be better than digging for answers in a larger board covering many products and better than using the search function because all relevant data will be presented within that board.

Someone may wonder about what type of tube an amplifier uses and do a search on it. After our updates are complete they would likely start by going to the support board for that particular amp where they would quickly find the information and at the same time stumble upon things they never thought to ask.

Ironically, even though it's a little slow around here (Spring time) the membership has grown by almost 100 users since we moved all those posts back in January. That is double the past rate of growth. Some are new members from audiophiletalk who found this forum.

Meanwhile, hang in there until I complete the new boards and initial posts for each one. Then we can get to moving messages around until everything starts to make sense.

Hey Dank I have noticed the change/evolution.The whole thing has kinda been a little confusing, but its all a transition.Like Steve says it will all come together sometime in the future and most of us will adapt and get used to the changes and some of us may wonder how we did without them.Getting a great concept to come together takes a little work and some time.

I think your post probably hits the nail on the head for most people so I thank you for it!

My apologies for confusing (diffusing) everyone - I anticipated it.

You can simply FORGET about Audiophiletalk.com. We still have a General section here that is the nucleus of these forms for our extended family of customers and people just getting acquainted with Decware.

My presence here has been fairly sparse since January as I've had a lot on my plate, but I'm back now and here to stay.

So with that said, let it be clear that there are not two Decware forums, Audiophiletalk is offically a separate entity.

This is all that needs to be remembered, or read. The remainder of this post is a personal explanation of what's been going on and for those who don't know, what the heck is Audiophiletalk.com?

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No one loves this forum more than I do. I started it around 1996 (I think) and it has developed into a tight community of enlightened audiophiles whom I sincerely enjoy and who's ideas and comments I take to heart.

I've always found it interesting, the ratio of members vs. lurkers (guests). I think the average is 1:15 making the guests the overwhelming majority of readers.

Granted, low power tube gear and high efficiency speakers is a very small niche in the audio world, but over the years I have done everything I could to promote the growth of this forums membership. After all, it's the members who post, not the guests, and of course the more new members there are posting the more interesting everything becomes.

Particularly in the past 4 years I've watched the membership grow at a snails pace. For a long time I thought the membership was growing rather fast until I figured out 60% of the members were actually spam bots that registered on the forum. Once I cleaned all those out of the member list we were down to just a few hundred real and active members. At least now all of the members of this forum are the real deal.

Needless to say around Christmas of last year I realized that the membership here would never become large like Audiocircle or Audioasylum etc, with memberships numbering in the tens of 1000's. But I wish like hell it could. It finally hit me that this forum, as wonderful a sales tool as it is, is a manufactures forum not a large public forum, and will never see those kind of numbers.

It is important to my business to get exposure through this forum because it keeps me from having to advertise. A simple banner add on a high traffic site can run into a couple grand a month which would force me to raise our prices. I'm still pretty dedicated to maintaining one of the best audio values there is through our products and prices.

So I had an idea.

I decided to start another business with a web site called Audiophiletalk.com and host a genuine public audio forum not unlike the two mentioned above. As a public forum and not a manufactures forum it stands a reasonable chance of growing into the kind of membership numbers of the other large audio forums on the web.

This I can do for a couple hundred bucks a month and a initial investment of my time to set it up and that I far less expensive than advertising on Audiogon, or other high traffic sites.

Of course you may be wondering how this could possibly help Decware, but being the "silent" owner of Audiophiletalk.com I can control the advertisements that appear there. So naturally, Decware will be represented with a nice skyscraper ad on the forum at all times - along with others.

This concept won't work until the site, audiophiletalk.com achieves high traffic and large memberships. I'm the kind of guy who can plant an oak tree from a seed and wait for it to grow. I guess that would make Audiophiltalk an acorn. If it survives and grows, the plan will work flawlessly to bring fresh blood into this hobby and into our extended family of customers. That's two birds, one stone. I want to continue to expand the niche of low power tube gear and high efficiency speakers as well as grow my business.

Once audiophiletalk was created we had an empty forum with no posts and no members and no chance in hell of getting it off the ground, so to jump start it, I moved 54000 posts from this forum to audiophiletalk and duplicated the membership so anyone here could also post there without having to re-register. It was a seamless transition for the most part.

Posts that ended up on audiophiletalk that promoted Decware products were deleted or moved back here, and this is a process I am still working on. The reasons for that should be obvious. Audiophiletalk is designed to attract new members from all aspects of the hobby. It is important that when a person firsts discovers audiophiletalk.com that he or she see it as a public forum, and not a "saturated with Decware posts" forum.

So I hope this clears up the anticipated confusion, and please accept my apologies for rocking the boat! However I'm sure you would agree that this hobby and this forum would be even better with more new people in it!

Good to have the info about whats been going on. Hope all your efforts pay off and that the forum grows and grows.. Sorry about the Sleepy in the other thread, I knew you were a busy dude and it was mostly a joke .. Great products and forums IMO... Dave